ULA’s Atlas-5 rocket launches 29 Leo satellites for Amazon
ULA this evening successfully placed 29 more Leo satellites into orbit for Amazon, its Atlas-5 rocket lifting off from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida.
ULA is in the process of retiring the Atlas-5 rocket. It now has only seven Atlas-5 rockets left in stock, with one reserved for Leo launches and six for Boeing’s Starliner manned capsule (though there is a good chance some if not all of the Starliner launches will be switched to other payloads). Because its Vulcan rocket, intended to replace Atlas-5, is presently grounded, the company appears to be accelerating Atlas-5 launches, with the last few launches space only about a month apart.
With this launch, Amazon now has 331 Leo satellites in orbit, out of the 1,616 it needs to launch by July to meet its FCC license requirement. It is not going to meet that requirement, because two of the five rockets it contracted for launches are presently grounded (ULA’s Vulcan and Blue Origin’s New Glenn), and only one launch is presently scheduled before July, by Arianespace’s Ariane-6. Furthermore, ULA has only one more Atlas-5 scheduled for Leo, and the ten launches Amazon had purchased from SpaceX are not scheduled. For these reasons, Amazon has asked for a time extension, which the FCC is presently considering.
As this was only the fourth launch by ULA in 2026, the leader board for the 2026 launch race remains unchanged:
63 SpaceX
30 China
8 Russia
7 Rocket Lab
For the third straight year SpaceX leads the entire world combined in total launches, 63 to 54.
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Boeing owns the six Atlas 5s reserved for Starliner launches. Given:
1. How much Boeing has lost on Starliner to-date and how much it might still lose by flying it on what looks, right now, like a maximum of three more missions.
2. The virtual certainty that Starliner will find no other takers after the end of ISS.
3. Amazon’s current between-a-rock-and-a-hard-place situation anent launchers.
I wonder if Boeing might be amenable to a deal to transfer those Atlas 5s to Amazon for a price that at least diminishes the total losses incurred on the Starliner program and simply write the sorry thing entirely off of its books. About all Boeing may have by way of interesting Amazon in paying “above retail” for these rockets is immediate availability. Amazon can likely get a better deal on another tranche of Falcon 9 launches, but it might have to wait awhile for those to actually fly – as seems to be the case already with the currently-in-waiting 10.
Just a thought.
Dick Eagleson: I had the same thought, which I mentioned yesterday in reporting the New Glenn explosion and detailing Amazon’s situation.
Boeing has done something similar in the past, in connection with getting out of its Sealaunch partnership with the Russians. Granted, it had a different leadership team, but the precedent has been set. It seems to me to make great sense to sell at least three of those Starliner Atlas-5 launches to Blue Origin. ULA will be thrilled, because it has shown it can get those off quickly (this year for sure) and make money on them.
Since the Atlas family is about to have its final launch in the next few years, I thought it would be appropriate to look back on a system that began development 1946 (!)
https://youtu.be/TeGmIeu0xvI
PS – I looked this up because I couldn’t believe it could have anything to do with that I remembered from elementary school as an ICBM